Reclaiming a stolen inheritance

Acupuncture and Chinese herbalism for the people.

No single person invented acupuncture or Asian herbalism. For millennia, people apprenticed and practiced to care for their communities.

The US acupuncture profession is a colonized space. 75% of licensed US acupuncturists are white.

Orientalism and Chinese Medicine

Orientalism and Chinese Medicine

Learn the real history of Chinese medicine in the diaspora, both its radical roots and subsequent commodification. Experience an introduction to elemental healing and Chinese herbalism. Reclaim healing power for our communities. 

Chinese man seated, black and white photo

Ing (Doc) Hay saved lives in his community through the 1918-1919 pandemic. After his death, his loved ones found $23,000 USD of uncashed checks. He prioritized care over profit.

Dr. Miriam Lee 李传真 was instrumental in getting acupuncture legalized. She treated 75-80 patients per day, about 17 per hour. In order to provide as much accessible care as possible, she developed an elegant 10-point protocol now called “Miriam Lee’s Great 10.”

“Liberation Acupuncture… [insists] that every aspect of acupuncture practice and theory be considered from the perspective of oppressed people, giving their needs priority over other considerations.” - POCA Tech

Dr. Mutulu Shakur was the the co-founder and co-director of the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America and the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture.

Dr. Tomson Liang provided free community acupuncture according to his 400 years of family tradition. Like many Asian practitioners, he was marginalized by the acupuncture professional bodies established and led by white graduate students in the 1980’s. He wrote, "I taught many M.D.s to use needles; [but] because I am an unlicensed person, I should not use needles but only in an approved medical school under the direct supervision of an M.D. who knows nothing about acupuncture or even under a student which I taught to supervise his teacher. Does this make sense?" 

The Black Panthers and Young Lords connected healthcare to liberation and established the People’s Detox Program, taking over Lincoln Hospital and developing a highly-effective ear-acupuncture protocol still used today.

* All payments go directly to the clinic, not to Camellia. Clinic interns pay approximately $14,000 to work upwards of 900 hours providing supervised clinical care.

My family has lived on the indigenous land of 台灣 for centuries. My great-grandmother had bound feet.

My great-grandpa 林呈祿 wrote against the Japanese occupation by editing the resistance paper Taiwan Youth.

My grandpa Lee Ting-Chien and his father Lee Chao-Shun were both medical doctors. Grandpa was a pediatrician through WWII and
白色恐怖 martial law. According to oral tradition, we come from practitioners of esoteric folk medicine before we became medical doctors.

They sent my father Dr. Lee Tsung-Liang to Taipei American School, where a guidance counselor told them that their children couldn’t be bilingual.

In my father’s household, English language and western culture were valued as social capital to escape from martial law. Our ancestral folkways were backwards; the West was modern.

I have been trying to access our traditional medicine since 2010, when a white man in Taiwan told me that “Chinese people don’t accept [TLGBIA] people.” (This is false.)

At every juncture, I have encountered cultural appropriation and Orientalist exotification, gatekeeping and structural harm.

To reclaim my inheritance, I am now tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

I persist because this is the work of my lifetime. My grandmother gave me the name 李道玲, which she translated as the “way of ingenuity.” With the strength of the 午 horse and the clever resourcefulness of the 子 rat, I honor my ancestors’ sacrifices and keep going.

This is my offering to my ancestors, my descendants, and my communities.

How can we be in right relationship with this medicine?

Of course I can’t speak for all Asian people on the continent and in diaspora.

However, I am an Asian diaspora person who personally knows many Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, queer, non-binary, survivors, working-class, women, and femmes who struggle in the existing structures and/or left the US acupuncture profession completely due to the field’s entrenched systemic inequities.

To become a licensed acupuncturist in the broken system that the white grad students of the UCLA cohort and their peers created in the 1980’s, prospective students must pay or take on debt for $75k minimum, more often six figures to cover living expenses while going full-time and being out of the work force for 4-5 years. (The exception is POCA Tech!)

I have broken down emotionally and almost dropped out more times than I can count. Not because of academic rigor or specific issues with my wonderful school, but because of an unending onslaught of microaggressions. This is a common experience.

Like many other diasporic families, my grandparents chose assimilation in order to keep their bloodline alive. In the context of Kuomintang martial law, WWII, the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese Civil War, Lee Ting-Chien and Suchin Lin Lee saw English and “modern” medicine as the strategy to survive. Our folkways were a liability. Their sacrifice gave me everything I have, and I am profoundly grateful.

It is excruciatingly painful and unjust to know my family lost access to our Old Medicine due to white supremacy, and then have to navigate a price-gouged, inaccessible system characterized by orientalism, entitlement, gatekeeping, exotification and cultural appropriation.

  • Please support acupuncturists of color. We had to overcome many structural barriers to practice that our white peers do not. Check out the Black Acupuncturist Association practitioner database here. In particular, please support the practitioners who have kept this practice alive for hundreds of years: the Asian clinicians in Chinatown and other immigrant communities who may not speak English or have the social capital that others do.

  • I’m so proud of you, and our ancestors are so proud of you. Let’s connect and support each other: camellia@camelliadaoling.com

  • I’m so glad you’re here. I hope that you’re feeling supported and protected on this journey. Feel free to reach out to me directly at camellia@camelliadaoling.com. I have lots of resources and would love to build community!

    1. Please ask yourself why you choose to take up space in and make a living/future living off of this medicine. (I am sincerely glad if you had wonderful personal health experiences with this medicine! I hope you and everyone always have access to amazing healthcare. Still, I ask you to reflect.) Why did you choose to pursue a career practicing medicine that your ancestors didn’t? If you haven’t thought about that, please do. I don’t have the answers for you, but the fact that you didn’t have to think about it is because the existing acu-system was set up by people who felt entitled to call themselves experts and make the rules in a tradition their ancestors didn’t practice. And many, many marginalized people suffer because of that. You choosing to reflect is optional, because they never did.

    2. Reflect on how much space you take up in the classroom or the profession. Do you hold a position to gatekeep others from access to this medicine? Do you enjoy talking a lot in class? How might this impact people who encounter barriers that you don’t?

    3. Redistribute resources. Literally, pay me; I am not joking. I and my people are owed reparations. Tyler Phan, PhD lays it all out in his dissertation and his monograph “When White People Took Our Medicine.“ White Americans first outlawed the practice of acupuncture, then created a bureaucracy that systematically makes this medicine inaccessible for the working-class Asian people who preserved it to study, practice, or receive it. If not me, pay Tyler Phan for his work documenting this theft. Pay reparations to Chinatowns like those in LA and Philly that are fighting gentrification.

    4. If you feel that I’m too angry, know that there have been Asian people in your presence who felt these things and didn’t say them because of the backlash that comes when white people get defensive. Anger is the way the Wood element breaks through the frigid Earth of winter and freely flows. Maybe you’ll listen if it comes from a white man. (You have a LOT of work to do if you need to take his word for it in order to take this seriously.) Russell Brown writes,

    “In 1972, a group of White psychology grad students from UCLA–who had only just discovered acupuncture a couple years before–positioned themselves as the field's experts, named themselves the "National Acupuncture Association," and used their political clout to pass the US's first acupuncture law, AB1500, which granted themselves the ONLY legal licensure in CA–suddenly outlawing anyone else practicing, precipitating the arrest of 64 Asian practitioners, including the Bay Area’s Miriam Lee and even the UCLA cohort’s own teacher, Dr. Ju Gim Shek...

    [This is] a chilling reminder of the complicated relationship between White practitioners (which now make up roughly 75% of the profession) and the heritage of the medicine; and that our licensing bodies and the schools that service them–largely created by Boomer men (yes, I said it)–are not benevolently apolitical, egalitarian or above reproach, and are still regurgitating the gate-keeping of these various modalities, across so many fields but particularly in “wellness spaces”…

    As a Caucasian practitioner, I have to see myself in this lineage, even as I know better.  I try to be mindful when I occupy space in “Chinese Medicine” dialogue online or in the press: how might I be affecting my Asian and Asian-American colleagues? And more insidiously–as my colleague Dr. Emily Siy once asked me to consider–how do I actually benefit from the absence or erasure of Asian people from the dialogue? 

    These are tough questions to confront but we must because we do not get to claim outright ownership of the knowledge, technique and history of these heterogeneous medicines simply because we bought into the professional legitimization created in the 1970s by people who manufactured their own "deed" for the usage of needles. 

    Or because we paid exorbitant tuition to private schools who work for the same institutional bureaucracies and are increasingly failing to meet the standards for gainful employment.

    Particularly on the heels of the death of Dr. Mutulu Shakur–whose work with the Black Panthers and Young Lords to bring acupuncture to the states fought against the professionalization and credentialing that criminalized Dr. Liang–I hope we all take some time to reflect on how our work may be affecting our Asian and Asian American colleagues, many of whom will never sit for the boards, and remember that Dr. Liang's frustration, rage and grief is dyed in the ink in the licenses hung in all our offices.”

You deserve to feel safe, honored, empowered, seen, and cared for.

“Love is Lifeforce.”

— June Jordan